Advances in IMD and integrated circuit technology have made it possible to store large amounts of diagnostic and therapy data. In particular, IMDs including but not limited to cardiac pacemakers and implantable cardiac defibrillators, and cardioverters, increasingly have the capacity to store large amounts of data. The data may include EGM waveforms, interval data for various heart chambers, and marker data generated by the IMD processor based on analysis of the waveform data and their morphologies.
Stored data in IMDs is generally accessed via telemetry communications. Specifically, IMD data is downloaded by uplinking to a programmer using wireless telemetry. Examples of telemetry systems may be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,354,319; 5,345,362; 5,383,909; 5,843,139; and 6,091,986, all herein incorporated by reference. The increased data storage capacity of IMDs requires navigation and review of various diagnostic and therapy episodes, thus creating difficulties in extracting data that may be of immediate use to physicians and healthcare providers. Specifically, physicians are being increasingly overwhelmed with the volumes of data they must interpret. The recent advent of in-home telemetry systems for retrieving and transmitting cardiac data over networks or the Internet will likely further increase the amount of data to be interpreted.
What would be desirable are apparatus and methods for alleviating the burden of data overload without sacrificing patient care. What would further be desirable are apparatus and methods for analyzing episodes stored IMDs so that concise clinical summaries of the data can be presented to the physician for quick analysis and review. Accordingly, apparatus and methods for immediately drawing the attention of the treating physician to cardiac patient data of likely concern would be most beneficial.